


silence; and the faces of my friends

by regrowing_a_heart



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, POV First Person, angst everywhere, namine needs more love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 11:19:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5624902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regrowing_a_heart/pseuds/regrowing_a_heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"O starshine on the fields of long-ago, bring me the darkness and the nightingale; dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home, and silence; and the faces of my friends." -  excerpt from Memory by Sigfreid Sassoon</p>
<p>'Being as I am, I have to understand the deepest complexities of the mind, and memory especially. I have to know what feels real to people. </p>
<p>But their minds…</p>
<p>Their minds are different.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	silence; and the faces of my friends

To remember – to have known, to have been, to idolise what was – is a fickle thing to do. Memory is, by its very nature, unreliable. You remember things as if you were watching them though a fogged up pane of glass. Images appear muffled and indistinct – you can never remember exactly what anyone said, but you remember the feeling. Happiness is amplified and magnified – pleasant memories are gold tinged as sunset, held up in high esteem as being the best time of your life, even if, at the time, they were quite unremarkable. Sadness, however; sadness becomes a black pit of despair. Everything is worse. Small disappointments become moments in which your whole heart is torn apart, the very worst thing that you’ve ever felt.

I know this truth, perhaps more than most. Being as I am, I have to understand the deepest complexities of the mind, and memory especially. I have to know what feels real to people. With the (not always willing) practice that I’ve had, I am quite good at it by most people’s standards. It’s easier to manipulate the minds of strangers, I’ve found. If you know someone only by their mind, then you have no real emotional connection to them. I’ve manipulated many minds, even in an existence that has lasted….I don’t know actually, but probably not very long.  ~~It feels like millennia.~~

But their minds…

Their minds are different.

I knew this from the moment that I first reached out and touched them. The first mind –the boy hero’s, the one who has already saved the worlds once – is one that bursts with light. It’s so clear and unhidden – he keeps no secrets from anyone. I had never been faced with an honestly this acute, and so was stunned by it.

The worrying part was that I _knew_ him. There were memories, memories that half-belonged to me, half to… Who? A name, hidden in my mind, a name that was ~~mine~~ perhaps mine before I was here, in this white oblivion. I remembered afternoons playing, laughing, with him, long days where we woke with the sunrise and slept at the sunset, on islands where we knew all the secrets of every nook and cranny. A home, too, family. Emotions, feelings – things that were as foreign as the outside world to me, things that I had never experienced, only made mimicry of – rose up inside me.

What was this?

I pushed past the unwelcome feelings, reached inside to twist and pull, to meld and shape his mind to my will. His memories become clay, and I the potter with skills unparalleled. For the first time, I felt doubt. His mind seemed so unique. ~~I didn’t want to hurt my friend.~~

Wouldn’t it be more interesting if, instead of taking away his memories I…played around with them? Perhaps unconsciously, perhaps purposely, my own desires of belonging leaked into his head, and then suddenly, I was there, running along with him, me another girl, and another boy. And it felt so natural, so completely right, that I just let it happen. I let myself become part of his head, ~~and so I would come to make my first mistake.~~

And then there was the second boy.

His mind was the complete antithesis to the first’s. It was a dark, fathomless pit of self-loathing and regret; of anger, and a wistfulness for what could have been. Diving into it was like drowning- everywhere was this same black abyss, and I whirled around inside it, trying to find my footing. I reached out and grabbed for something, anything, to cease this endless fall. My consciousness reached out for the small spot of light in his mind – well buried, but definitely there.

Inside was the same place that the first boy held so dear in his mind – the name unrevealed, but definitely that same place. The aspects remembered were different here, though. It was less about the place, and more about the people, those that I he loved. Though the memory itself was a happy one, it was tinged with regret. Regret that spoke of a failure to protect what mattered, what he had so loved then and still did, even if he did not feel that those feelings deserved to be returned.

I looked at that and felt...sad. Not the emptiness that I had come to know for myself, but sadness for him. Emotion, again, something that I had been told time and time again I couldn’t feel. I knew him, too. Had cared for him, in that fuzziness inside my own mind that did not belong to me. It hurt, physically hurt, to see him as unhappy as he was. ~~I wished nothing more than for him to be happy.~~ But even I, with the immense power that I possessed, could not take all of this away. Not without it feeling like a lie, ~~and I could not do that to him.~~ And so I reached out again and fell into his mind, linking us all, him, me, the hero ~~and the princess~~.

What happened next was my own doing – my own childish mistake, my own longing to belong, to have friends, a home, and all the feelings and emotions that came with it.

~~I don’t regret it. I really should.~~

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first fic in this fandom (well, the first that i've worked up the courage to post), but it isn't my first fic by any stretch. i'm just...really bad at finishing things. i wrote this prior to playing CoM, so forgive me for any continuity errors.
> 
> follow me on tumblr if you want to! : http://alone-in-my-little-infinity.tumblr.com/


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